To grow, a brand has to be remembered and be found.

To understand mental availability, it helps to picture memory as a network. Romaniuk and Sharp use the term brand salience for the set of links that connect a brand to concrete buying and consumption situations. Those situations are Category Entry Points, or CEPs, the doorways through which people enter a category. Hot weather, the beach, a barbecue, happy hour, a last-minute gift: each works like a door, and the brand linked to it has a better chance of being recalled when someone walks through.

That has a consequence that often surprises marketers. A brand can be known by almost everyone and still have little salience, either because it is tied to few situations or because those ties are weak. What counts is how many relevant doors it occupies, and how firmly.

Those links don’t form on their own. They need anchors that memory recognizes quickly, which Romaniuk calls Distinctive Brand Assets: colors, symbols, shapes, sounds and rituals that let people identify a brand effortlessly, sometimes before they read the name on the label. Advertising uses these assets to lay down the memory, and the point of sale relies on the same assets to bring it back the moment someone glances at the shelf.

Not every visual element of a brand deserves the name. By Romaniuk’s standard, an asset is distinctive only when it meets two conditions: it is unique, because no competitor in the category uses it, and it is famous, because most buyers link it to the brand. Whatever fails that test may make the pack prettier without helping anyone remember whose pack it is. With those ideas in hand, it becomes easier to see why two very well-known beers win in very different places.

Picture a cooler planted in the sand on a summer afternoon. If someone asks for a beer in that setting, the image that comes up is likely a clear bottle with a wedge of lime in the neck. In the “beach, sun, heat, downtime” situation, Corona’s memory network is stronger than Heineken’s, even though Heineken is the bigger of the two globally.

The explanation is consistency. For years Corona repeated the same assets (the clear bottle, the lime, the beach imagery) until the link between that situation and the brand became almost automatic. Each new piece of advertising reinforced the same entry point, and the accumulated effect shows up precisely where the brand concentrated its effort. The chart below, illustrative as in the source material, compares the relative strength of the two associations without a numeric scale.

At the beach, owning the moment is worth more than being the biggest brand in the market.

That advantage has a specific address, though. Swap the sand for a bar counter and the result changes sides.

A big Champions League match, a packed bar, friends gathered around the TV. When it’s time to order the first round, the contest between the two brands reverses. In the “game night, a bar with friends, Champions League” situation, Heineken’s memory network easily outweighs Corona’s, the product of more than 30 years linking the Heineken group to European football.

The association started to form before Heineken itself appeared on the tournament’s boards, through another brand in the group.

1. 1994
   The UEFA Champions League partnership begins

   Through Amstel, a brand from the same group.

2. 2005
   Heineken takes over the boards

   The red star starts sharing the screen with the trophy and the anthem.

3. Today
   The “big game” has become a brand cue

   Decades of anthem, trophy and star on screen, matchday after matchday.

Over that time Heineken has combined two kinds of asset. Some are its own, such as the red star and the green of the bottle; others are borrowed from the tournament, such as the pitch-side boards, the trophy and the anthem. Shown together for decades, the borrowed assets have been absorbed into the brand’s memory to the point that they work as if they belonged to it.

Side by side, the two cases lay out the full logic of the model. Corona owns the beach, Heineken owns game night, and neither owns the whole consumer, since the same person may pass through both moments in a single week. Each brand dominates the entry points where it has invested decades of consistent assets, because salience is built situation by situation far more than category by category. For anyone running a brand, the most useful question becomes which moments it is remembered in, and which it is missing from.

The model says what matters but leaves an operational question open: how do you know, campaign by campaign, whether the brand is winning or losing each moment? A survey run far from the beach, the bar and the shelf tends to measure recall in the abstract. In the physical world, both pillars leave traces that can be read in the place and at the time things happen.

Mental availability is measured by asking people who were in the right place at the right time whether they recall the brand and which situation they associate it with. Physical availability shows up on the item-level receipt, which tells you whether the brand was in the store, at what price and with what share of the basket. A third signal ties the two together by revealing where and when each consumption moment happens, from beaches to bars and stadiums, and how many people pass through, hour by hour.

Combined, the three signals answer the two questions the model leaves every brand with: whether memory was built in the moments that drive the category, and whether, when the shopper reached the store, the brand was there to be chosen. For a brand manager, that means planning communication around consumption moments as well as audiences. For a media planner, it means reaching the people who frequent those places at the hours they fill up. The sales team, in turn, can check store by store whether distribution keeps pace with the recall the campaign is building.